2015 Arctic Sea Ice Maximum Annual Extent Is Lowest On Record

2015 Arctic Sea Ice Maximum Annual Extent Is Lowest On Record

March 19, 2015

The sea ice cap of the Arctic appeared to reach its annual maximum winter extent on Feb. 25, according to data from the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. At 5.61 million square miles (14.54 million square kilometers), this year’s maximum extent was the smallest on the satellite record and also one of the earliest.

Arctic sea ice likely reached its annual maximum winter extent on Feb. 25, barring a late season surge. At 5.61 million square miles (14.54 million square kilometers), this year's winter peak extent is the lowest and one of the earliest on the satellite record that began in 1979.

Image Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

“The winter maximum gives you a head start, but the minimum is so much more dependent on what happens in the summer that it seems to wash out anything that happens in the winter,” said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “If the summer is cool, the melt rate will slow down. And the opposite is true, too: even if you start from a fairly high point, warm summer conditions make ice melt fast. This was highlighted by 2012, when we had one of the later maximums on record and extent was near-normal early in the melt season, but still the 2012 minimum was by far the lowest minimum we’ve seen.”

Here the 2015 maximum is compared to the 1979-2014 average maximum shown in yellow. A distance indicator shows the difference between the two in the Sea of Okhotsk north of Japan.